Mixed Heritage | Mixed Culture | Mixed Identity | Mixed Parenting

Native American Heritage

“Justin Petrone, like me, is a mixed race person with Native American ancestry, although unlike me, initially, he never thought of himself in those terms. I’ve always known and since I was a child, self-identified myself in that way. Like me, Justin has spent years searching for his elusive ancestors, more often than not, hidden in the mists of time with only suggestions of who their ancestors are by words on tax lists and census records like “free person of color.”

Most of the time, Native people were transparent, until they became at least “civilized” enough to be counted on the census, or taxed or they did something else to bring them into the white man’s realm. More recently, Justin and others like us have been able to confirm, or deny, that heritage via DNA testing. So even if we don’t know exactly who our ancestor is, we are positive THAT our Native heritage is real. In some cases, through DNA testing we can learn which of our ancestral lines is Native.”

Billy Bowlegs III was born in 1862. His father was African-American and his mother was Seminole. He took the name Billy Bowlegs as an adult after the great Seminole chief who led his people through the Seminole Wars.

Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, also known as Zitkala-Sa or Red Bird, was born in 1876 to a full-blooded Sioux woman and a white man. She struggled with her mixed-race heritage as a child on the reservation as well as off.